ESA£s ¦fth and ¦nal Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), GeorgesLema Štre, performed its fully automated rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station (ISS) on August 12, 2014. The ATV£s navigation sensors have shown their worth docking the 20-ton vehicles with aft port of the Space Station, manoeuvring into position and docking with an excellent accuracy. For the second consecutive time after ATV-4, the accuracy at docking was such that the ATV probe head was directly captured inside the Zvezda docking mechanism without contact with the receiving cone. From 30 km and down to a distance of 250 m, ATV uses GPS (Global Positioning System) information from its own receiver and the Station£s that is transmitted over a radiofrequency link. As it moves closer, ATV switches to laser navigation, using the re §ec-tion of laser pulses on re §ectors mounted on the Space Station. This paper presents the achievements and performance of ATV GNC (Guidance, Navigation, and Control) across the 5 missions for both types of navigation. It will also discuss the observations made during the various §ights regarding unforeseen conditions such as space environment or target pattern contamination having a potential impact on performance and how they were resolved.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.